In recent days, both from the Catholic and the Ukrainian Orthodox front headed by its own Moscow Patriarchate, voices had been raised for Patriarch Kirill – notoriously closely linked to Vladimir Putin – to pronounce clearly against the war of invasion. But his response was quite different. In a sermon-shock delivered yesterday on Forgiveness Sunday, which opens Lent in Russia, Kirill in fact spoke in open justificationist terms of the war in Ukraine, seen as a struggle against the promotion of sinful life models contrary to Christian tradition.
The main example? Gay Pride. For the patriarch of Moscow, the “outbreak of hostilities” came after “for eight years there have been attempts to destroy what exists in the Donbass”, “where there is a fundamental rejection of the so-called values that are offered today by those who claim world power “. And according to Kirill, “today there is a test for loyalty to this government, a kind of transition to that ‘happy’ world, the world of excessive consumption, the world of visible ‘freedom’. Do you know what this test is? It is very simple and at the same time terrible: it is a gay parade ». In his sermon at the end of the Divine Liturgy in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, the Orthodox patriarch only referred to the pro-Russian victims in the Donbass, and never to those of the current invasion. And he urged resistance against the “values” promoted by the gay lobby.
“If humanity recognizes that sin is not a violation of God’s law – he observed -, if humanity agrees that sin is one of the options for human behavior, then human civilization will end there”. And the gay parades “are designed to demonstrate that sin is one of the variations of human behavior.” “This is why to enter the club of those countries it is necessary to organize a Gay Pride parade – he continued -. And we know how people resist these demands and how this resistance is repressed by force. This means that it is a question of imposing by force a sin condemned by the law of God ”. According to Kirill, “what is happening today in the sphere of international relations, therefore, has not only a political significance”: “it is a question of human salvation, of where humanity will end up”. “Everything I say has not only a theoretical meaning and not just a spiritual meaning. Today there is a real war around this topic, “he remarked.
“We have entered into a struggle that does not have a physical meaning, but a metaphysical one – he therefore insisted on the need to fight -. I know how, unfortunately, the Orthodox, the believers, choosing the path of least resistance in this war, do not reflect on everything we think about today, but humbly follow the path that the established powers show them “. “Today our brothers in Donbass, the Orthodox, are undoubtedly suffering, and we can only be with them, especially in prayer,” concluded Kirill. At the same time, “we must pray for peace to come as soon as possible, for the blood of our brothers and sisters to stop, for the Lord to incline his mercy towards the suffering land of Donbass, which has carried this sad sign for eight years, generated by human sin and hatred ”.
Yesterday the patriarch pronounced these words at the same moments in which Pope Francis launched his new appeal against the “madness” and “cruelty” of a war in which “a river of blood and tears flow”. «What must be done now, first of all, is to stop the weapons and the fighting but above all to avoid an escalation. And the first escalation is precisely the verbal one, “the secretary of state, card. Pietro Parolin, explaining that “the intervention of the Holy See takes place on several levels”, “religious”, “humanitarian” and “then there is the availability of initiatives on the diplomatic level”.
Meanwhile, the missions to Ukraine of the two cardinals sent by the Pontiff are underway: the almsgiver Konrad Krajewski, who will try to reach the country via Poland, and the ‘ad interim’ prefect for Human Development, Michael Czerny, who instead it will pass through Hungary.